A Crown of Lights mw-3

by Phil Rickman

Behind the hearse came an old-fashioned taxi, like a London black cab. Merrily saw brake lights come on about a hundred yards down the lane and she moved quietly towards them. Stone posts stood stark against the last of the light and she heard the grating of metal gates.

  Silhouettes now. Someone in a long overcoat pushing a bier. Merrily watched the coffin sliding onto it under the raised tailgate of the hearse, saw the bier pushed through the gates. It was followed by several people fused into one moving shadow.

  Against the band of light below the grey roller blind of evening, she could see the roof of the old rectory. No lights on there. The taxi started up, rolled away down the lane. No sign of another car.

  No sign of Barbara Buckingham.

  Suppose Barbara had accosted Weal, made a nuisance of herself, and Weal – as a solicitor, able to expedite these things – had responded with some kind of injunction to restrain her. In which case, why hadn’t Barbara told Merrily? Why hadn’t she left a message?

  At the gates, peering down an alley of laurels, Merrily was pulled sharply back by the realization that this whole situation was entirely ridiculous. Only Jane would do something like this. But then more headlights were glaring around the bend behind her, and she slipped inside the gates to avoid them.

  The vehicle went past on full beams: not Sophie’s Saab but a fat four-wheel drive with two men in it. Leaving Merrily standing on the property of J.W. Weal as, somewhere beyond the laurels, a single warm light was anointing the bruised dusk with an amber balm.

  She followed the laurel alley towards the house, now only half expecting the dramatic eleventh-hour appearance of Barbara Buckingham like the dissenting wedding guest with just cause for stopping the service.

  By the house, the drive split into a fork, one prong ending at a concrete double garage, the other dropping down a step and narrowing into a path, its tarmac surface fragmenting into crazy paving to cross the lawn – which was wedge-shaped and bordered by spruce and Scots pine. At the narrow end of this wedge stood a conical building, the source of the light.

  The wine store... the ice house... Menna’s waiting tomb.

  Merrily stood by the last of the laurels, on the edge of the lawn, and looked up at the Victorian house – substantial, grey and gabled, three storeys high. The light from the open door of the tomb, maybe forty yards away, was bright enough to outline the regular stone blocks in the back wall of the house. She could see the shadows of heavy, lumpen furniture in the room immediately behind a bay window on the ground floor. This house was very J.W. Weal.

  At its end of the lawn, the mausoleum was a squat Palladian temple. Victorian kitsch, its interior was creamed with electric light from two wrought-iron hanging lanterns. Then the light was suddenly blocked and diffused... two men looming. Merrily backed up against the house wall, laurel leaves wet on her face.

  ‘Mind the step, George.’

  ‘He could use a light.’

  ‘Knows his way down yere in his sleep, I reckon.’

  The undertakers maybe? Must be the departure of the last outsiders.

  Feeling very much on her own now, Merrily moved down the lawn, stopping about fifteen yards from the door of the mausoleum. From an oblique angle, she could see inside, to where mourners were grouped around a stone trough set into the middle of the floor. She saw Ellis, in his white robe. She saw a wiry bearded man, a squat bulky man, and a woman. They were still as a painted tableau, faces lit with a Rembrandt glow. And she thought, aghast, This is intrusion, this is voyeurism, this is none of my business!

  This was about a man – not an affable man, not an immediately likeable man, but a man who had loved his wife, who had treated her with great tenderness till the last seconds of her life. Who had – whatever you thought of rebaptism, rebirth in the faith – come with her to Christ. Who could not bear to be entirely parted from her. Who had chosen to gaze out every morning from their bedroom window, probably for the rest of his life, across to where she lay.

  That’s it. I’m going. She turned abruptly away.

  And walked into the man himself.

  Her face was suddenly buried in the cold, crisp shirt-front in the V of his waistcoat.

  It smelled of camphor.

  For a moment, she was frozen with shock, let out a small ‘Oh’ before his big arms came around her, lifting her off her feet. For a flowing second, she was spun in space through the path of light from the tomb, and then put down in shadow and held.

  ‘Men-na,’ he breathed.

  The great body rigid, compressing her. Camphor. Carbolic. She was gripped for a too-long moment, like a captured bird, and then the arms sprang apart.

  ‘I’m sorry...’ she whispered.

  He was silent. Neither of them moved.

  A small night breeze had arisen, was rippling the laurels and sighing in the conifers. The firs and pines were like sentries with spears. J.W. Weal was just another shadow now; she didn’t feel that he was looking at her. The line of light shivered, and Merrily saw figures standing in the doorway of the mausoleum. Nobody spoke, nobody called to her. It was dreamlike, slow-motion.

  She turned and walked away – trying not to run – across the lawn, in and out of the path of light, her arms pressed into her sides, as though his arms were still around her. The strong light from the mausoleum haloed the old rectory, illuminating the inside of the bay-windowed room on the ground floor.

  And then, as she was looking up at that same window, it became dark all round. The door of the mausoleum had been closed. They’d been waiting for Jeffery Weal to return from the house, and now they’d shut themselves away for the finale, leaving darkness outside. The lawn was black, the track of light from the tomb having vanished. Merrily felt small and bewildered and ashamed, like a child who should be in bed but had peered through the bannisters into an unknown, unknowable, grown-up world.

  Men-na.

  What was he thinking then?

  She searched for the entrance to the drive. Without light, she would need to go carefully.

  Yet there was light: a dull, diffused haze behind the bay window, where the backs of chairs threw rearing shadows up the interior walls. She now hated that room. She knew it was very cold in there, colder than it was out here. She didn’t want to be looking in. She didn’t want to see...

  ... the pale figure flitting across the wide windows, from pane to pane.

  The slight, moth-like thing, the wisp of despair.

  She didn’t want to see it. She couldn’t see it.

  But as the room came out to her, enclosing her in its pocket of cold, she could almost hear the flimsy, flightless, jittering thing beating itself against the glass in its frenzy, with a noise like tiny crackling bones.

  Merrily flailed and stumbled into the laurels, slipped on numbed legs and grabbed handfuls of leaves to keep from falling. Only these weren’t the laurels; they had thorns, winter-vicious. Still she clutched them in both hands, almost relishing the entirely physical pain, then she scrambled up and onto the drive, hobbling away towards the gateposts.

  Part Three

  The vast majority of charismatic churches are aware of the dangers of confusing demonic attack with psychological problems... There are, however, some charismatic groups which are inclined to carry out a ministry of deliverance which concerns most other charismatic churches and which leads to ‘casualties’.

  Deliverance (ed. Michael Perry) The Christian Deliverance Study Group

  23

  Tango with Satan

  SINCE COMING HOME to her apartment at the vicarage, Jane had... well, just slept, actually. Longer, probably, than she’d ever slept before. She woke up briefly, thought of something crucially important, went back to sleep, forgot about it. Just like that for most of a day.

  It was the hospital’s fault. Hospitals were, like, totally knackering. Unless you were drugged to the eyeballs, you never slept in a hospital – be more relaxing bedding down on a factory floor during the night shift. Naturally, Jane had tried tellin
g them this, but no, they’d insisted on keeping her in, in case her skull was fractured or something worse. Which she knew it wasn’t, and they knew really, but it was, like – yawn, yawn – procedure, to forestall people suing the Health Service for half a million on account of her having gone into a coma on the bus.

  Sleep was all you really needed. Real sleep, home sleep. Sleep was crucial, because it gave the body and the brain time to repair themselves, and because it was a natural thing.

  And, also, in this particular case, because it postponed that inevitable Long Talk With Mum.

  The Long Talk had not taken place, as expected, in the car coming home from Worcester Royal Infirmary last night, because it was Sophie’s car and Sophie was driving it, and Sophie – to Jane’s slight resentment – seemed more concerned about Mum, who had herself at one point fallen asleep in the passenger seat and awoken with a start – like a really seismic start – which made Sophie judderingly slam on the brakes going down Fromes Hill. Mum had shaken herself fully awake and said – in that flustered, half-embarrassed way of hers when lying – that something must have walked over her grave.

  And, like, trod on her hands? Why were both her hands clumsily criss-crossed with broad strips of Elastoplast, like she was the motorway pile-up casualty?

  Fell among thorns, was all Mum would say when they finally got home, must have been around ten. Bewilderingly, she’d hugged Jane for a long time before they’d staggered off to their respective bedrooms, without mention of the impending Long Talk.

  Odd.

  Jane slept through most of Sunday morning, venturing dowstairs just once for a bite to eat from the fridge – lump of cheese, handful of digestive biscuits – while Mum was out, doing the weekly pulpit gig. Then leaving her plates conspicuously on the draining board so that Mum would know she’d eaten and wouldn’t come up to ask about lunch and initiate the Long Talk.

  She vaguely remembered awakening to see Mum standing by the bed in her clerical gear, like a ghost, but she must have fallen asleep again before either of them could speak. She kept half waking to hear the ting of the phone: a lot of calls. A lot of calls. Was this about the accident? Or Livenight – Mum apologizing to half the clergy for screwing up on TV?

  For Sunday lunch, alone with Ethel the cat, Merrily had just a boiled egg and a slice of toast. Which was just as well because, before two p.m., the bishop was on the phone, enquiring after Jane and revealing himself to be a worried man.

  The Daily Mail had phoned him at home. Did he know that a former church in his diocese had become a temple for the worship of pagan gods?

  Well, of course he did. He’d seen the damned TV programme like everyone else, but he was hoping that either nothing more would be heard of it or it would turn out to be safely over the border in the Diocese of Swansea and Brecon.

  Not that he’d told the Mail that. He’d told the Mail he was ‘concerned’ and would be ‘making enquiries’.

  And this was one of them.

  ‘As it happens,’ Merrily said, ‘I was in Old Hindwell yesterday.’

  Bernie Dunmore went quiet for a couple of seconds.

  ‘That’s an extraordinary coincidence,’ he said.

  ‘It is. But nothing more than that.’

  ‘Did you see the church?’

  ‘Only the tower above the trees. I didn’t see any naked figures dancing around a fire, didn’t hear any chanting. Is it really true? Who are they?’

  ‘Witches, apparently. People called Thorogood, ironically enough. Young couple, came from Shrewsbury, I think. But he’s American.’

  ‘In parts of America, witchcraft is awfully respectable these days.’

  ‘Merrily, this is Radnorshire.’

  ‘Er... quite.’

  ‘As for the church – well, strictly speaking it isn’t a church at all any more. Did all the right things when they let it go. Took away the churchyard bones to a place of suitable sanctity. Virtually gave it to the farming family whose land had surrounded it for generations. Stipulating, naturally, that relatives of people whose names were on the graves should be able to visit and lay flowers, by arrangement.’

  ‘Why did they let it go? It’s not as though the village has an alternative church.’

  ‘Usual reasons: economics coupled with a very convenient period of public apathy.’

  ‘You could dump half the parish churches in Britain on that basis.’

  ‘Also, this isn’t a building of any great architectural merit,’ Bernie said. ‘Old, certainly, but the only history it seems to have is one of more or less continuous major repairs and renewals, dating back to the fifteenth century or earlier. The dear old place never seems to have wanted to stay up, if you get my meaning. Close to a river or something, so perhaps built on ground prone to subsidence. Things apparently came to a head when the rector at the time actually suggested it should be decommissioned.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Anyway, all that’s irrelevant. The unfortunate fact is, if it’s got a tower or a steeple and a handful of gravestones, the general public will still see it as holy ground, and there’ll be protests.’

  ‘But there’s nothing you can do about that, is there? You can’t actually vet new owners.’

  ‘The Church can vet them, obviously, when the Church is the vendor. And the Church does – we’re not going to sell one to someone who wants to turn it into St Cuthbert’s Casino or St Mary’s Massage Parlour. But when it’s being sold on for the second or, in this case, third time, you’re right, it’s more or less out of our hands.’

  ‘So is there any reason for this to escalate into anything?’

  ‘Merrily, this is Nicholas Ellis’s patch. This is where he holds his gatherings... in the village hall.’

  ‘I know. I was there for a funeral. The congregation was singing in tongues over the coffin.’

  The bishop made a noise conveying extreme distaste.

  ‘But the point I was about to make, Bernie, is that Ellis is Sea of Light. He doesn’t care about churches.’

  ‘Oh, Merrily, you don’t really believe the bugger isn’t going to start caring very deeply – as of now?’

  ‘You’ve spoken to him?’

  ‘Never spoken to the man in my life, but the press have. They didn’t tell us what he said, but I expect we’ll all be reading about it at length in the morning.’

  ‘Oh. Anything I can do?’

  Bernie Dunmore chuckled aridly. ‘You’re the Deliverance Consultant, Merrily, so what do you think you could do?’

  ‘That’s not fair. Look, I’m sorry I messed up so badly on TV, if that’s what—’

  ‘Not at all. No, indeed, you were... fine. As well as being probably the only woman on that programme who looked as if she shaved her armpits. Was that sexist? What I’m trying to say... you’re the only one of us who officially knows about this kind of thing and is able to discuss it in a balanced kind of way. Not like Ellis, that’s what I mean. Obviously, I can’t forbid the man to speak to the media, but I’d far rather it were you...’

  ‘The only problem, Bishop—’

  ‘... and if all future requests for information could be passed directly to our Deliverance Consultant. As the official spokesperson for the diocese on... matters of this kind.’

  Merrily felt a tremor of trepidation. And recalled the whizz and flicker, the crackle and tap-tap on the window of a room full of shadows.

  ‘But, Bernie, this job... deliverance—’

  ‘I know, I know. It’s supposed to be low-profile.’ He paused, to weight the punchline. ‘But you have, after all, been on television now, haven’t you?’

  Ah.

  ‘I won’t dress it up,’ Bernie said. ‘You’ll probably have problems as a result. Extremists on both sides. The pagans’ll have you down as a jackboot fascist, while Ellis is calling you a pinko hippy doing the tango with Satan. Still, it’ll be an experience for you.’

  She stripped off the plasters Sophie had bought from the pharmacy at Tesco on
the way to Worcester last night – a fraught journey, from the moment she’d stumbled into the Saab’s headlight beams somewhere on the outskirts of the village.

  She then changed out of her clerical clothes and went up to the attic to check that Jane was OK.

  The kid was asleep in her double bed under the famous Mondrian walls of vermilion, Prussian blue and chrome yellow. Merrily found herself bending over her, like she hadn’t done for years, making sure she was breathing. Jane’s eyes fluttered open briefly and she murmured something unintelligible.

  Merrily quietly left the room. They’d assured her at the hospital that her daughter was absolutely fine but might sleep a lot.

  Downstairs, the phone was ringing. She grabbed the cordless.

  It was Gomer. He’d just been to the shop for tobacco for his roll-ups and learned about the motorway accident.

  ‘Her’s all right?’

  ‘Fine. Sleeping a lot, but that’s good.’

  ‘Bloody hell, vicar.’

  ‘One of those things.’

  ‘Bloody hell. Anythin’ I can do, see?’

  ‘I know. Thanks, Gomer.’

  ‘So you wouldn’t’ve gone to Menna’s funeral then? I never went to look for you. One funeral’s enough... enough for a long time.’

  ‘You were in Old Hindwell yesterday?’

  ‘Reckoned it might be a good time. Found out a few things you might wanner know, see. No rush, mind. You look after the kiddie.’

  ‘In the morning?’

  ‘Sure t’be,’ Gomer said.

  Good old Gomer.

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘Flower!’

  Jane was standing in the kitchen doorway in her towelling dressing gown. She looked surprisingly OK. You wouldn’t notice the bruise over her left eye unless you were looking for it.

  ‘You hungry?’

  ‘Not really. I just went to the loo and looked out the window, and I think you’ve got the filth.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s outside in his car, talking on his radio or his mobile. Overweight guy in a dark suit. I’ve seen him before. I think it’s that miserable-looking copper used to tag around after Annie Howe, the Belsen dentist. I’ll go for another lie-down now, but just thought I’d warn you.’